From The Magazine

How Boyz n the Hood Beat the Odds to Get Made—and Why It Matters Today

When John Singleton first approached Ice Cube to be in a movie, the rapper didn’t take him seriously. But soon the novice actor, along with Cuba Gooding Jr., Laurence Fishburne, and Angela Bassett, realized Singleton’s script about South-Central Los Angeles was unlike anything that had come before it. A quarter century later, the cast and crew talk about making the revolutionary film.

BEFORE THEY WERE STARS
Director John Singleton with Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, and Morris Chestnut filming Boyz N the Hood, in South-Central Los Angeles, 1990.

From mptvimages.com.

‘Didn’t you read my script?” John Singleton asked rapper Ice Cube in
1990. Singleton, then a 22-year-old fresh out of the U.S.C. film
program, had set his heart on Cube to play Doughboy, a character based
on one of Singleton’s boyhood friends—but Cube was blowing the
audition.

Over a late breakfast at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, John
Singleton and Ice Cube began to tell how Boyz N the Hood—the
groundbreaking movie that put a human face on the gangsta-style killings
that were then infesting South-Central Los Angeles—came to be made.

Singleton ordered a full meal (salmon, lamb sausage, tomatoes, buffalo
mozzarella, orange juice) while Cube stuck to a couple of apple
martinis. “He’s more a man of refined tastes than a former gangsta
rapper,” Singleton said about his friend. Cube wore a Detroit Tigers
cap and sunglasses; Singleton looked like he had dressed for the golf
course.

Cube, one of the founding fathers of gangsta rap, described how he had
shown up at an office in South-Central Los Angeles to audition, but he
just wasn’t taking it very seriously. “I’m trying to be the best rapper
in the world. I’m not thinking about acting. And my manager was like,
‘Yo—somebody wants to put you in a movie! Here’s the script.’ ” Cube
threw the script into the backseat of his car. When he got to the
audition, he realized, “Oh, shit. He was for real. He wasn’t lying.
He’s going to do a movie. This kid is no bullshit.” But, he admitted,
“I was terrible.”

“Go home and read my script,” Singleton told Cube. “I’m going to give
you one more shot, because they don’t want to hire you, and I’m dying
inside. I know you’re good. I know you can do it.” Cube went home and
read the script, and he had an epiphany: “Damn, they’re actually going
to make a movie about how we grew up. I didn’t know how we grew up was
even interesting enough to be a movie. But the way John captured it, it
was like cinematic beauty.”

Singleton, Ice Cube, and Gooding, 1990.

By D Stevens.

So when Cube went back to audition again, he felt he had everything he
needed. “I know these characters back and forth. I can play any of
these guys. I could have played the Cuba part [good guy Tre Styles,
played by Cuba Gooding Jr.]. I could have played Ricky [Doughboy’s
half-brother, on the cusp of a football career]. I could have played
any of them, you know what I mean? Because they were all people I grew
up with and knew.”

Singleton and Cube had first met in 1989, when Singleton was a directing
intern on The Arsenio Hall Show. Cube had come to the show to hang out,
but Security was giving him a hard time. Singleton jumped in and said,
“Man, don’t you know who this is? This is Ice Cube! He’s with [the
rap group] N.W.A [Niggaz with Attitude]!” Singleton was thrilled
to meet one of his heroes, “because what they were doing in music was
giving voice to everything I had seen growing up.” He had even taken
his script’s title from a song by Cube that had been recorded by
Eazy-E—but only after paying Eazy $50,000 for the rights.

“You know, I just felt this dude was a little delusional,” Cube
recalled thinking when Singleton first approached him to be in his
movie. “It’s just a pipe dream—that’s what I was thinking.” By
January of 1990, Cube had left N.W.A to work with Public Enemy and was
giving a concert at the Palace in Hollywood. After the concert Singleton
again approached him. The two men stood talking in the empty parking
lot. “I’m a director now,” Singleton said, “and I’m going to get this
movie done, and you’re perfect for it.” But in the next breath, he
ended up having to ask Cube for a ride back to his U.S.C. dorm.

Cube recalls, “Now, I never do this. I don’t even give my boys rides.
I’m like, man, get your own goddamned ride! But John was so cool—there
was his energy and his passion, and I was like, ‘I’ll give you a ride
now.’ ”

“Wait. I like this part,” Singleton said, picking up the story. “So
we’re riding in Cube’s Suzuki Samurai . . . ” “No, a Suzuki
Sidekick, a two-seater,” Cube interrupted. Singleton continued, “We’re
going down the Harbor Freeway, but once we’re on the freeway, we’re down
into the hood. Cube popped in the beats from his first solo album
[AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted]—he’s still writing the lyrics.” He
started cycling through the beats, telling what he was going to do with
the songs, while Singleton described his vision for the movie: “We’re
just two kids talking about our dreams at this point. There’s no
guarantee that any of this stuff is going to happen. So that’s January
1990. By the summer, I was able to call him up and say, ‘This is real.
Come in.’ ”

Cube nailed the second audition. “He just starts doing the scene, and
it’s magic,” Singleton recalled. “As a storyteller, when you see
somebody who is the character you envisioned, you feel this energy in
the room. On that audition, you saw a star being born.”

The Story

It begins with Tre Styles, a bright young adolescent being raised by his
mother, Reva Styles (Angela Bassett), a hardworking, upwardly mobile
professional who is very protective of her only son. She realizes that
Tre needs a father figure in his life, so she sends him to stay with
Tre’s father, Jason “Furious” Styles (Laurence Fishburne), a mortgage
broker and Vietnam veteran leery of gentrification, and aware of the
dangers for young boys growing up in the hood. Singleton based Furious
Styles on his own father. “All the kids looked up to my father because
he was known to be that dude who knocks people out,” said Singleton.
“I wasn’t [affiliated with gangs] because I really didn’t have to
be.”

Furious is tough but loving, and he keeps a sharp eye out for Tre,
especially since one of his son’s close friends is Doughboy (Cube), a
tough gangsta-in-the-making, in stark contrast to Doughboy’s
half-brother, Ricky Baker (Morris Chestnut), an athlete who is offered a
football scholarship to U.S.C. When Ricky is shot and killed by a gang
member, Doughboy seeks revenge, and Tre has to decide which direction
his life will take. Everything hinges on the murder of Ricky Baker.

Laurence Fishburne was deeply moved by Ricky’s death scene: “The moment
where Ricky realizes he’s about to get shot, everything goes into slow
motion, the sound drops out, and he starts running. He is so beautiful
and so innocent—and he’s the fucking Goody Two-Shoes! He’s not
supposed to get killed! I wept when I read the script. I think about my
own kids. I think about kids everywhere.” Ricky’s lifeless body is
carried into the house, and his mother, Mrs. Baker (Tyra Ferrell),
attacks Doughboy, as if it’s all his fault, as if they’d killed the
wrong son. Steven Spielberg would later tell Singleton that moment was
one of the most powerful he’d ever seen on film.

Doughboy and his crew know they have to avenge Ricky’s murder, a
life-and-death decision on the shoulders of teenage boys about to become
men. “You had to feel for the boys in the hood,” Ice Cube said. “You
had to finally have a feeling other than ‘they’re hoodlums, they’re
gangbangers, they get what they deserve.’ These are kids, these are
youngsters, these are boys.”

Ultimately, Tre decides not to seek revenge. “Tre broke that chain of
violence,” said Bruce Cannon, a longtime friend of Singleton’s who was
the film editor on Boyz. “He has the option—he may kill or he may
not. Maybe he’s thinking of his father. It’s implied in the way we
edited it. And he makes the decision not to. That message still needs to
be heard.” Cannon pointed out that Singleton made a Hitchcock-like
cameo, showing up briefly as a mailman. “I found it interesting that he
was the mailman, delivering the news.”

Doughboy, the emotional heart of the movie, is based on Singleton’s
childhood friend Michael Winters, called “Fatbacc.” “That’s what he
called himself,” explained Singleton. “He used to be really heavyset.
He is one of those black men who can talk a mile a minute—very poetic.
He was part of my original crew growing up, but he was the only dude
that was really affiliated with gangs.” What’s especially moving about
Doughboy is that he truly has the heart of a warrior. In an early scene,
when he’s just about 10 years old, Doughboy bravely confronts a group of
menacing, young men in the hood. There’s no way he can take them on, but
his courage to stand up to them is breathtaking. In another culture, he
would grow up to be Achilles; in this one, he’ll be dead, unsung, before
he turns 30.

Singleton worked with casting director Jaki Brown to fill out the cast,
including a guy from the hood, Redge Green, who had rolled up to the
office in a wheelchair, saying, “I actually got shot in my legs. You
got to put me in this movie.” Singleton thought, “I didn’t even know
if this dude could act, but he got shot in his legs, so, ‘O.K., you’re
in the movie.’ ” And Dooky (Dedrick D. Gobert), “the dude with the
pacifier in his mouth, he was a kid that grew up in the avenues, on the
outskirts of Inglewood. He had such a personality I said, ‘We’ve got to
have him in the movie.’ It played so well because they were all from
similar backgrounds.”

Cuba Gooding Jr. auditioned several times to play Tre Styles. “I did
four or five screen tests, because they kept bringing me back,” he
recalled. “They wanted an established actor, but John insisted. He
said, ‘This is my guy.’ And every fucking time I came back, I wore that
gold-and-black Cavaricci shirt with black Cavaricci pants that are on
the poster to this day.”

Gooding’s acting career had been launched in a production of the musical
Li’l Abner, at North Hollywood High School. “I was Pappy, and I was
killing it!” he recalled. Gooding (whose nickname growing up was
“Cube,” which caused some confusion on the set, especially with Ice
Cube’s entourage: “Not you, motherfucker!”) said that to develop the
role of Tre he thought of actors like Spencer Tracy, Clint Eastwood, and
Denzel Washington. “There’s always this masculine, heroic stance that
these guys take. That’s why Tre holds himself a certain way. I always
saw Tre as presidential.”

Laurence Fishburne (Furious Styles) explained how he came of age as an
actor on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic, Apocalypse Now,
which he worked on when he was 14 years old. In a remarkable show of
range, he went from playing a cocky gunner’s mate in Apocalypse Now to
playing Cowboy Curtis in the television series Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
That’s when he was known as Larry Fishburne, and when he first met John
Singleton.

In his late 20s, married, with a son, Fishburne initially thought
Singleton was just hanging around to hear his stories about working with
Spike Lee in School Daze. But then he approached Fishburne, saying, “
‘I have a script I’m developing, and I really want you for one of the
parts.’ I said, ‘Slow down, stop, hold on. How old are you?’ And he was
like, ‘I’m 18.’ ”

Three years later, Fishburne received a copy of the screenplay. “I read
it, and when I turned the last page, I was in tears,” Fishburne
recalled.

On Apocalypse Now, Fishburne had absorbed Coppola’s approach of having
the actors improvise before filming a scene. He had done four movies
with Coppola by then, so on the set of Boyz, he became the de facto
acting coach for this crew of mostly novices, raising everyone else’s
game.

Singleton said he was acting, too—he was acting like he knew what he
was doing. But in fact he was scared to death: “I can’t fuck this shit
up, because my whole life I’ve been trying to do this.”

Chestnut on the run in a pivotal scene from the film.

From Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

Morris Chestnut, who plays the doomed Ricky, was teasingly called
“Black Jesus” on the set. Nia Long, who plays Tre’s girlfriend,
Brandi, recalled, “Well, he does seem like a black Jesus. He’s the
quintessential black man—dark, tall, handsome, smart.” Chestnut got
his SAG card after appearing in Freddy’s Nightmares, a TV show based on
A Nightmare on Elm Street. Like everyone else, he was surprised at how
young Singleton was. Ricky’s story resonated with Chestnut because “I
was also a high-school football player, and I’m black, and I had
aspirations of playing at the next level. U.S.C. was my favorite team.”

Nia Long grew up in South-Central L.A., though her mother had two
master’s degrees. “I didn’t want to be there [auditioning]. I
barely believed that I would make it as an actress, so when John
Singleton saw me in that hallway [before the audition], that was the
moment that changed my life. When I saw the script that said Boyz N the
Hood, my attitude came from protecting what I knew I was a part of. If
you’re going to show this, it better be right, because even though it’s
a world of less—a world of drugs, violence, poverty—it was still my
world.”

For Long, her love scene with Cuba Gooding was a rite of passage.
“Cuba’s kind and happy and wanted to get it right,” she recalled. “He
came from a different experience from the rest of us. His father was in
the jazz world.” (Cuba Gooding Sr. was the lead singer of the soul
group the Main Ingredient, perhaps best known for their 1972 pop hit,
“Everybody Plays the Fool.”) Long was uncomfortable doing her first
love scene, “because I had never done that before. It felt like a
violation to have somebody touch my boobs,” she said. But she later
realized “it was part of the business. But Cuba—he de-virginized my
boobs!”

Angela Bassett (Reva Styles) described how she was trying to transition
from being a TV actress to appearing in films. “One day I got a call to
go meet this young director for this movie, Boyz N the Hood. I was like,
Boyz with a z? I still remember going down to Leimert Park, that
neighborhood off of Crenshaw. You just didn’t go down to Crenshaw. It
was like, you know, you take your life in your hands.” Having grown up
in the projects, where it was usually the women who looked out for the
kids in the neighborhood, she knew the Reva Styles character. She also
knew how rare good roles were for African-American women. When she first
moved to Hollywood, she noticed how “they cast the white male, then
they cast his partner who is also male, and then his lady, and by the
time they get down to the role where they cast me, you know, all the
money is gone.”

Tyra Ferrell had played “ghetto moms with bad mouths” a couple of
times and wanted to read for Reva Styles, said Steve Nicolaides, the
film’s producer, but that part was already cast, so she ended up playing
Mrs. Baker. “You can’t do better than her in that role,” he said,
especially in the heartbreaking scene when they carry Ricky’s body into
the house. “She steals the movie.”

Roots

John Singleton was born in 1968, one of the most volatile years in
American history. Two things shaped him: movies and the Black Arts
Movement. “When I was small, in the early 70s, my mother took me to see
Cooley High. At the end of the movie, Cochise gets killed by two dudes,
knocked up against the L train, and he doesn’t get up. And my mother
starts crying. I’m like seven years old. I looked at my mother and I
said, ‘Why are you crying?,’ and she said, ‘Because it’s such a good
movie.’ So I start thinking, when I get to make a movie, I got to make
people cry. I got to make them feel something.”

His mother’s apartment, in Inglewood, off of Century Boulevard, near Los
Angeles airport, overlooked a drive-in theater called the Century
Drive-In, which showed mostly B movies. “I would watch these
movies—but silent, on a drive-in screen. There would be blaxploitation
films, horror movies—The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
Halloween—whatever was the slashy movie at the moment, and then kung
fu movies,” Singleton recalled. “You saw nudity sometimes. I always
say that Pam Grier’s tits inspired me to make movies.”

Singleton was a big fan of Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, and of Hector
Babenco’s Pixote, the 1980 Brazilian movie about a homeless boy who is
turned into a criminal by corrupt adults. He also loved François
Truffaut’s The 400 Blows—”having the little kids’ faces seeing the
ills of the adult world, but you’ve never seen that with black faces.”

“The cinema saved me from being a delinquent,” Singleton believed. “I
could have been, but I didn’t get caught up. I never was going to get
arrested or anything.” He was accepted into U.S.C.’s film-studies
program in screenwriting, “pretty much the only black student” among
24 freshmen.

The other big influence in his life was the Black Arts Movement of the
1970s, and one of the most important people he met at that time was the
rapper Tupac Shakur. He later wrote his film Baby Boy with Tupac in mind
to play the lead, but the rapper was murdered, in 1996, in Las Vegas,
before they got a chance to do it. “That’s how Tupac and I got close,
because we grew up in that movement. It’s what gave us a sense of
self—there was always this emphasis on being black and proud. And if
you grow up poor and black in this country, you have nothing else.”

It was Stephanie Allain who got the ball rolling. She was working as a
reader for Amy Pascal and Dawn Steel, two powerful executives at
Columbia Pictures, and was about to be promoted. She made it known that,
as she moved up, she wanted to be replaced by another person of color.
“The next thing I know,” she recalled, “this sort of nerdy-looking,
bespectacled, skinny guy shows up in my office, ostensibly to interview
for the job.” As soon as he got in the door, though, John began
pitching his screenplay for Boyz. He didn’t get the job, but he piqued
Allain’s interest—she got hold of his script and read it for herself.
“I just locked myself in the room and read it right away,” she
recalled, “and I was sobbing when I closed the last page.” She called
Singleton’s agent, Brad Smith at CAA, saying, “I’ve got to have this,”
only to be told that John Singleton was determined to direct his movie,
though he had never directed anything before.

Dawn Steel had just resigned as president of Columbia Pictures, a
casualty of Sony buying the studio from Coca-Cola, and she had been
replaced by Jon Peters and Peter Guber. Their responses were middling.
“This was before the big 90s black-film renaissance,” Allain
explained, “so people just did not get it. I didn’t get it either. I
just knew that the story moved me profoundly.” Allain was shocked at
how little support there was for taking on Boyz. “Everyone who had sort
of implied allegiance really didn’t show up for me,” she remembered,
“except Amy Pascal, who was adamant about how good the writing was.”
At a meeting to decide on upcoming projects, Allain found herself out on
a limb as they went around the table until Frank Price—just hired by
Jon Peters and Peter Guber to head Columbia Pictures—got on board. He
was one of the few Hollywood executives to come from a writing
background, having worked on scripts for television Westerns, and he had
green-lighted hugely successful films, including Kramer vs. Kramer,
Ghostbusters, and The Karate Kid.

“We finally got to Frank, who just said, ‘I think it’s fantastic. I
think the script’s great, and we should do it.’ And that was it,”
recalled Allain.

She informed Price that Singleton had to be made director or they
couldn’t do the film. There was pushback—they offered to buy the
script for something like $100,000 but not have him direct. “At this
point, John had no money. I mean, $100,000 is a lot of money” for a
22-year-old with student debt, says Allain, but Singleton held out.
Price realized that Boyz had been “tagged as a ‘dark ghetto picture,’
which was tough to get audiences for.” But he gave Singleton the
go-ahead to audition some of the actors he had in mind.

When Singleton came back with Ice Cube’s and Cuba Gooding’s audition
tapes, Price was blown away. They “just jumped off the screen,” he
recalled, and that satisfied him that Singleton “had good taste in
actors.” Still, he knew he was taking a gamble. “From the standpoint
of a studio head, this kind of picture is the worst thing you can do,
because if it fails, there’s nobody to blame but you. They look at it
and say, ‘Why make something with an unknown writer, unknown director,
and unknown actors?’ That’s how you lose everything.” But Price had
often taken a chance on risky stories, and was especially drawn to tales
of race and gender. He’d been responsible for such films as Gandhi, Cry
Freedom, A Soldier’s Story, Tootsie, Out of Africa, and A League of
Their Own—all successful films, but each one a risk in its day.

Now the search was on for a really good, experienced producer. Music
mogul Russell Simmons was sent a copy of the script, as he was then
transitioning from producing music to producing films. Reading the
screenplay during a trip to Las Vegas, Simmons knew right away that he
wanted to make the movie, but he, too, had his reservations about
allowing a 22-year-old novice to direct the film. “Russell really
wanted John to go do some music videos for him,” Allain recalled, “to
get comfortable behind the camera.” But Price knew that would delay
filming, so he passed on hiring Simmons, who felt that he was unfairly
cut out of the process. “I was in Hawaii hanging out with Jon Peters,”
Simmons recalled. “I said we’ve got to make this movie. He said, ‘No
problem.’ ” But Columbia went ahead and did the project without him.
“Basically I just got shafted,” Simmons recalled.

Allain remembered a good friend, Steve Nicolaides, who had been working
on big commercial movies, including the Rob Reiner films Stand by Me,
The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally . . . , and Misery, so she
sent him the script. “He read it and said, ‘What do I need to do? I’m
in this!’ ” Nicolaides went over to Singleton’s house and met him and
his mom. “She had a big lemon tree in her backyard,” he recalled,
“and she made homemade lemonade.”

Singleton told Nicolaides that he wanted to work with as many black crew
members as possible. “I don’t care if I’m the only white person on the
set,” Nicolaides told him. He asked Singleton why he was even being
considered to produce Boyz. “Because you worked on my all-time-favorite
movie, Stand by Me,” Singleton replied. The 1986 film was also a
coming-of-age story, involving a group of boys who set out to find a
dead body, which also occurs early in Boyz, as an homage to Reiner’s
film.

Singleton directs Laurence Fishburne.

By D Stevens.

‘So we’re out there shooting, and it feels like a Crenshaw night,”
recalled Cube. “It’s one of those streets that just had a vibe. All day
people went to hang, and it felt fun, but it also felt dangerous.” One
night on the set, the tension was just burning after a gang member
threatened to come back with his gun. So when they filmed a shooting and
the cast and crew heard the sound of the gun going off, their reaction
was all too real—they were running for their lives. “It was funny
afterwards, but goddamn, man, I was running!” recalled Cube.

Cuba Gooding described another scene “where we’re running along a wall,
and there are dogs chomping at our legs. . . . They just got some wild
dogs in the yard and we ran. If we fell and tripped, they would have
fucking chewed us up, me and Morris!”

Gooding said that an earlier experience had prepared him for the scene
in which he’s thrown against a police car by a black cop. “I was a
break-dancer at the 1984 Olympics,” he recalled, “with a crew of other
young kids, and at the same time, hanging out in the streets dressed as
a break-dancer. But every once in a while, police officers would
misinterpret us as being gang members, so they would put us up against
the wall and they would damn near strip-search us and throw us to the
ground and say very abusive things to us. So when we did that scene in
Boyz, and [a cop] throws me on that hood, it brought me right back
to that day. It was a well that I could pull from. I knew it was God’s
will that I was supposed to do that role.”

Nicolaides was aware of the potential for real violence. One night,
after a long day of shooting, he got a phone call from a friend. He’d
heard from “a guy named Bone, who runs the Bloods in an area they call
‘the Jungle’—which was right across the street from where we were
going to do the scene where Ice Cube shoots the [gang members] who
killed Ricky,” recalled Nicolaides. So Nicolaides met with Bone, who
had a huge guy sitting next to him. Over dinner, Bone said, “ ‘Word on
the street is that this little movie is dissing the Bloods.’ And I said,
‘No, nobody is affiliated to anyone.’ ”

“But Ice Cube’s wearing a blue Detroit Tigers hat, and the bad guy’s
got a red [and black] Chicago Bulls hat on. They drive a red
Hyundai—that’s dissing to me,” Bone said. “I don’t care about your
little movie. I run a business here, and the profits that I make, I take
the kids in my world to the ocean, I take them out fishing, but I can’t
prevent some 14-year-old walking up with a 9-mm. and shooting Ice Cube
in the back of the head if you’re going to shoot right across the street
from me.”

So the next day Nicolaides went to the set and said, “John, you told me
that colors didn’t matter, and now the hood thinks that Boyz N the Hood
is dissing the Bloods, and we’re scheduled in three days to have Ice
Cube kill the murderers at a burger stand right across the street from
the Jungle.” But Singleton didn’t want to make any changes; it fell to
Nicolaides and Ice Cube to persuade him to change the location to Eat a
Burger in the Crenshaw mall. “We shot there, had no problem,” said
Nicolaides.

Because it was Singleton’s first film, and considered a small movie for
Sony, Bruce Cannon recalled, “we had a lot of freedom. It almost felt
like an indie film. Sometimes studios can come in with a billion notes
and take away the heart of a movie and milk it down. But that didn’t
happen on Boyz, and that made it a special film.” In fact, Nicolaides
saw that the only white people from the studio who came to the
set—just a short drive from Culver City—were the publicity people.
And even then, he said, “they came only in the last week because they
started to hear the buzz” about the movie. “All of a sudden, everyone
wanted a piece of the action”—eventually Jon Peters wanted a
producer’s credit—”but it was already done.”

The Response

‘The first time we showed the film to a test audience it was a cold day
in April or May, and they recruited an audience from South-Central to
come to the Sony studio,” Nicolaides explained. The bus pulled up at
three in the afternoon for a five o’clock screening, “and they made
everybody stand outside the studio in the cold. They finally filled up
the theater with a fairly pissed-off audience, and the guy who ran the
test programs got up and said, ‘Good evening, this is an unfinished
work. When you see a white leader with squiggly lines, that indicates
“dissolve to,” the sound is not perfect.’ A black guy in the balcony
said, ‘Shut up and start the fucking movie!’ ” But once it began, the
excitement was so intense it was “like being at a Bruce Springsteen
concert in the 70s. It was amazing. So we knew.”

Cannon, who was at the screening, realized that “blacks hadn’t really
seen themselves like this on film before.” A shot of a familiar bodega
or a street got cheers and applause. “That really hit me, that their
world had not been portrayed. It made me think of the scene where Ice
Cube says about Ricky’s murder, They don’t show it on TV because no one
cares. It’s not their neighborhood.”

Nia Long and Gooding during filming.

By D Stevens.

Frank Price realized he had to find a way for white audiences to know
that “this picture is for them, too.” So he and his team worked out a
strategy: they would take Boyz N the Hood to Cannes. They rented a
number of billboards and just put graffiti up. “Nobody in Cannes knew
what the hell it was,” remembered Price. It was an afternoon screening,
and “all of black Hollywood royalty was there—Wesley Snipes, Spike
Lee, Denzel—they were all there,” recalled Nicolaides. Quincy Jones
had flown in with Eddie Murphy from the Montreux Jazz Festival. For
Singleton, it was his first time out of Los Angeles. When he arrived in
Nice, he noticed a lot of press at the baggage claim, swarming over
Forest Whitaker, who’d won best actor in Cannes a few years earlier, for
Clint Eastwood’s Bird. On the way from the airport, Singleton was
knocked out by all the billboards for the Boyz N the Hood premiere.
“Cube and I motion to stop the car,” Singleton recalled. “We jump out
all excited taking pictures in front of the posters . . . Then we
turned and looked at the beach, and there is wall-to-wall
women—topless! There were various degrees of wannabe models flashing
the best and worst European plastic surgery. I looked at Cube and he
looked at me. We just got back into the car and went to the Carlton. The
execs were at the [Hôtel] du Cap. When I had lunch there,
Schwarzenegger was holding court, Malcolm McDowell was telling jokes
poolside, and Belinda Carlisle from the Go-Go’s was walking around
topless.”

A bit overwhelmed, he hid behind his camera—the very thing that
brought him to Cannes in the first place—as a way to protect himself.
“You have to look at this,” Singleton explained, “from the
perspective of, I’m a kid who’d never left the country. I couldn’t eat
anything but steak frites and scrambled eggs, and now I’m hanging out
with Madonna in the South of France as she goes jogging in the mornings
in a Boyz N the Hood T-shirt.”

Critic Roger Ebert saw the movie at Cannes and “wrote a love letter of
a review that was just essential for us,” recalled Price. Ebert was in
the audience for a press screening with his African-American fiancée,
Chaz Hammel Smith, and by the end of the film he was crying. His review
broke open the film to a crossover audience. Describing it as not just a
“brilliant directorial debut, but an American film of enormous
importance,” Ebert saw that the need to prove one’s manhood, in a
neighborhood awash with guns, doomed young lives. As we learn from the
text that flashes on-screen at the beginning of the film, “one out of
every 21 black American males will be murdered in their lifetime.”

By the time the public screening of Boyz took place in Cannes, they had
to turn away hundreds of people trying to get into the 700-seat theater.

Back in the U.S., the film had a tailwind from Cannes, but after a
terrific opening Columbia had trouble getting bookings in theaters
because there had been some shootings at showings of New Jack City, the
drug-and-gang drama directed by Mario Van Peebles that opened four
months before Boyz.

But despite some bad publicity involving fears of gang violence, the
film was a financial success, earning $69 million on a $6 million
investment. John Singleton received Oscar nominations for best director
and best screenplay. Nicolaides said, “It did incredible business, and
it only got released in 811 theaters. Columbia never went broader than
that.”

‘It’s such an important movie,” said Russell Simmons, who wishes he had
been the one to produce it. “It’s a tragedy that’s still going on to
this day. It’s insightful in the way that rap music is insightful. This
story plays out everywhere, all over the country now—even the rest of
Middle America is interested because it’s not that foreign to
them. . . . It’s unfortunate we have to tell it so many times, and it
will be told even more now, it seems.”

Nia Long agreed. “We could have made Boyz N the Hood yesterday. I grew
up 10 blocks away from where we shot the movie. It was as if John
Singleton cut a hole in the wall and filmed my own life. . . . We’ve
been having the same conversation about race for 40 years. It hurts my
soul that we are still having these conversations.”

“I think about my kids,” Fishburne said. “I think about kids
everywhere, mostly young black males, because we don’t initiate young
men. The Jews have Bar Mitzvahs to initiate boys into men, but for the
boys in the hood, their Bar Mitzvah is guns, drugs, prison. Young men
will initiate themselves because we don’t do it for them, and the way
they do it is gang initiation, or some negative, shadow aspect of
masculinity.”

Even after the explosion of black films in the 1990s on the heels of
Boyz—and the stellar careers of Ice Cube, Laurence Fishburne, Cuba
Gooding Jr., Angela Bassett, Regina King, Nia Long, and Morris
Chestnut—little has changed in Hollywood, especially when it comes to
honoring black films, actors, writers, directors, and producers.
Singleton still believes that Hollywood “doesn’t want black films about
the way blacks really live.”

The 2016 Academy Awards created a backlash of anger when it failed to
nominate Straight Outta Compton and ignored director Ryan Coogler for
Creed and actor Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation. #OscarsSoWhite
called for a boycott of the Academy Awards, and the controversy was the
subject of much of comedian Chris Rock’s jokes in his role as host of
the annual awards presentation.

Nia Long asked, “So, do I boycott the Oscars because nobody black was
nominated? I think that’s ridiculous. But it’s equally ridiculous that
nobody was nominated, because I think Straight Outta Comptonshould have
been. Those actors—those kids—were amazing. It’s the same thing they
did to Boyz—none of the actors were nominated . . . Hollywood is a
country club. It’s a boys’ club. It’s restricted, absolutely. I feel
like I have a visitor’s pass.” (It should be noted that, in June, the
Academy expanded its membership, pledging to double the number of women
and minorities eligible to vote for the Oscars.)

Ice Cube said, “I think you got Boyz, and then everything else fell
apart. You have a movie like Menace II Society, which might hit on the
gangster stuff but misses on the heart. I think once people realized
they couldn’t top Boyz N the Hood, they just stopped trying. They just
stopped trying.”